We are proud to announce that Engine Yard is now the first official sponsor of the open source project, the Lithium PHP framework. We believe that Lithium holds a great deal of promise and we want to help it reach its full potential. Therefore, not only are we pledging our financial support, we will be working together to promote the framework to our customers and partners and the community at large through conferences, meetups and webcasts. (Just to be clear, we’re not assuming ownership of the project, but partnering with the core team for the benefit of the community.)

Lithium is one of the more lightweight MVC frameworks for PHP, and is highly configurable. Its main goal is to allow you to get just what you need, and get it fast. It has a dedicated core team of contributors, including:

[Garrett Woodworth](http://twitter.com/gwoo), one of the co-founders of Lithium. He was formerly the project manager of CakePHP, where he focused on usability and development.

[Nate Abele](http://twitter.com/nateabele), one of the co-founders of Lithium. Also formerly a lead developer of CakePHP, Nate is also a founder of a group of software craftsmen called the [Union of RAD](http://union-of-rad.com).

[Thomas Maiaroto](http://twitter.com/shift8creative), a very talented designer & web developer who owns his own consultancy called [Shift 8 Creative](http://www.shift8creative.com/about).

[David Persson](http://twitter.com/nperson), an independent contractor out of Hamburg who has logged over 500 commits to the Lithium codebase.

[John David Anderson](http://twitter.com/raisinbread), a software engineer at Adobe, and one of the original contributors to Lithium.

The Lithium team has exciting plans for the future (which we’ll talk about in a forthcoming blog post). We are thrilled to be helping push this project forward!

If you are a PHP developer and have not had a go at using Lithium, we would love for you to have a look and give the Lithium team your feedback. For updated information, you can follow the Lithium project at @unionofrad and Engine Yard at @engineyard.